Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Landscape Suicide
1987 · James Benning · Landscape Suicide on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch the empty street stay on screen after nothing happens. (camera)
Benning holds a locked shot of an ordinary place, a sprinkler, a parked car, long after you've taken in all the information it offers.
Payoff: The shot forces you to look at a place for its own sake, with no action waiting to happen in it. In the reading: espace quelconque. The reading calls this an any-space-whatever: a place that has stopped being the backdrop for someone's action.
Notice how different the color feels in each half. (light)
California gives you dry hills and pale flat light, Wisconsin gives you snow, bare trees, and low gray sky, and the film never explains the switch.
Payoff: The two climates argue that violence is not one thing but a set of local conditions.
Listen for the total absence of music. (sound)
Wind, birds, traffic, and machinery fill the landscape passages, but no score ever tells you when to feel dread or relief.
Payoff: Without music cueing your reaction, whatever unease you feel is something you supplied yourself.
Watch the speaker sit centered, facing straight at the camera. (staging)
Both performers are locked in frame addressing an interrogator you never see, given the same flat, undescriptive space as a hillside or a farmhouse.
Payoff: You end up sitting in the interrogator's chair, with no one on screen to stand in for you.
Notice the flat, recitation-like delivery of both speakers. (performance)
Rhonda Bell and Elion Sacker speak case language with affect withheld, their rhythm just off natural speech, so you stay aware someone else's words are being said.
Payoff: The flatness keeps you from mistaking a recitation for a confession you actually understand.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch the held shots as evidence, not scenery, the way Benning wants you to read the ground like a transcript.